PROGRESS OF FORESTRY IN WISCONSIN 597 



however, iiiaiM roads will make horses more efficient and rangers will be 

 required to supply them. 



It is planned to build a road system in which the main roads will checker- 

 board the whole reserve area in such a way that they will be about three miles 

 apart or as nearly that as the many lakes and swamps and the abandoned 

 logging road grades will allow. From the main roads, fire-lines will be made 

 to cut the areas into plots of about forty acres each. These plots will very 

 often be extremely irregular and in order to make strategic points accessible, 

 trails will be brushed out. The main roads are for the most part built by 

 removing the ties from old abandoned logging railroad grades and leveling off 

 the surface with plows and drags. The result is an excellent wagon road 

 with grades rarely exceeding seven per cent, all for a cost of about |50 per 

 mile. Wherever possible, lire-lines are built by simply dragging old railroad 

 grades after the ties have been removed. ^Vhere roads will become main 

 thoroughfares, care is taken to build them well for permanent use, while 

 less expensive fire-lines and trails are made when protection is the only reason 

 for their construction. Sometimes it is necessary to cut lines between natural 

 fire protections such as lakes, wet swamps, etc. Here, the lines are made 

 about thirty feet wide, the brush cut out and burned and the line plowed and 

 dragged. There are now about 100 miles of main road and about 50 miles 

 of fire-lines. The latter were built to protect plantations and what little 

 natural reproduction survived the big fires of the past three years. 



The reforestation policy was vigorously pushed this year. A nursery site 

 was chosen, centrally located for field planting and well protected by forest 

 on three sides. An area was cleared off for a nursery with a capacity of 

 about one million seedlings annually; a water system using the Perry pneu- 

 matic pump was installed, and a main pipe and laterals laid so that a fifty- 

 foot hose would reach all the beds. The beds were laid out 4 x 12 feet with 

 18-inch paths. Each bed was surrounded by a. frame covered with poultry 

 wire and provided with two removable top screens, one of poultry wire and 

 the other of lath. Over 200 beds were made, of which 84 were planted to 

 white pine, 64 to Norway pine, 28 to Scotch pine, 14 to western yellow pine 

 and 16 to Norway spruce. Most of the seed was sown broadcast, a small 

 part in drills. Germination was rapid on account of the very warm spring 

 and effects of damping off soon appeared. In calculating the amount of seed 

 to sow, an allowance was made for loss due to various causes and as this is 

 the first nursery established in this region, a rather large factor of safety was 

 used. Damping off caused the greatest damage, but even that was slight. 

 The white pines suffered a loss of 10 per cent ; Norway pine, the seed of which 

 was collected near the nursery site, did not show any effects of the disease, 

 while that collected in other localities suffered a loss of five per cent. About 

 fifteen per cent of the Scotch pine and forty per cent of the Norway spruce 

 were killed. The western yellow pine was not affected. The nursery was 

 almost entirely free from weeds during the whole growing season, due per- 

 haps to the fact that the ground was broken up for the first time and weeds 

 that grow in free sunlight had not had a chance to seed up the area, and those 

 that had formerly grown there would not stand the full light. The rodents 

 did not bother the first planting, but a few beds that were sown later in the 

 summer w^ere entirely destroyed. The final counts show that a factor of 

 safety slightly too large had been used and where a million seedlings were 

 expected, about one and one-fourth million were produced. These will be 

 transplanted when two years old. 



During the three or four years necessary for these seedlings to grow to a 

 suitable size for field planting, plantation operations will be carried on with 



